Sound poetry indeed

From Bach to Beamish, concerts big and small worked their magic on our writer

To concerts in London’s long-established halls — the Festival and Queen Elizabeth, the Barbican and Wigmore — I added a trip to a newer place, the little recital and recording (and eating) space of the Forge in Camden, an attractive eco-building that opened in 2009. This year Andrea Rauter and the composers Philip Cashian and Joe Cutler have been presenting modern-music concerts there on the first Wednesday of the month, and the latest was a programme shared by members of the adventurous EXAUDI choir and the young Gildas Quartet.

The EXAUDI first half was devoted to “sound poetry” by such figures as Jackson Mac Low (a follower of Cage) and Mauricio Kagel. Amusing, in its way, especially Kagel’s Con Voce, in which three deadpan singers holding instruments “played” them only by means of vocal imitation, the visual power of suggestion making it all the more adroit. But it was the Gildas’s acute